Defining GitLab runners and their relationship to CI/CD

Recall that GitLab CI/CD is a series of tasks performed against code in your project, which often include some combination of build, test, and deploy jobs. Importantly, CI/CD pipelines are not run inside the GitLab application, as each job will generally require some specific platform and set of tools to successfully run.

Note

GitLab runners are programs that accept CI/CD jobs from GitLab, run the jobs’ tasks in an appropriate execution environment, and then report the results back to GitLab.

GitLab Runner is an open source application written in Go

The official repository for the GitLab Runner application lives in a project hosted on GitLab.com called gitlab-runner. At the time of writing, you can navigate to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner to view the project’s development and source code. Like the main GitLab application, GitLab Runner follows a monthly release cadence. The latest version...